Because who wouldn’t want to know how often their friends poop?

Most of us grew up with a healthy shame surrounding the act of pooping. We weren’t supposed to talk about it at meals. We were made to say “excuse me” when we passed gas. Today, many of us can’t go poop in a public restroom for fear that someone else might be in the same bathroom and hear us.

It seems, though, those days of shying away from pooping are gone. A new cell phone application, Poop Map, has been gaining popularity. For those people who love to know where, when and under what circumstances their friends poop, this app is for you. Anyone else? This app is something else.

Americans are not raised to be comfortable going poop, let alone talking about it. Books, television shows and movies don’t typically show characters going to the bathroom. They never explained how Katniss and Peeta went to the bathroom inside the arena in The Hunger Games (they must have been on camera, I still have questions).

Television characters don’t have to stop to go number two during a big battle scene or when they’re on the run. I mean, it seems highly likely that someone had to go to the bathroom during the big battle scene in “Avengers: Endgame,” but it would have been anticlimactic if Tony Stark asked for a bathroom break right near the end.

If on the off chance, pooping was brought up in the media or with our friends, it was for the sake of humor. Poop and fart jokes may be the bassist and least clever of humor, but when you’re a kid, that stuff is comedic gold.

However, those kids grow up. Suddenly, the idea of talking about pooping is less funny and more awkward. Do you know why it’s a running joke that you can get out of work by saying you have diarrhea? Because no one wants to think about another person pooping long enough to contemplate if they should be working.

Yet, despite all the awkwardness around pooping and the inability of many mentally healthy people to poop when others are around, there is now an app, Poop Map, that allows you to track and share your bowel movements.

For those who aren’t familiar, Poop Map is fairly simplistic in design. It has several tabs within the app. The first is a literal map, that includes geomarked flags where friends have pooped, popping up in real-time.

Also on that first page is a button where one can “Drop the poop.” When you click this button, you can say where you’re pooping, give a description of the poop (lord help us all) and a rating of the poop.

There are also tabs that allow you to search and find friends to keep up with their… habits, and another tab where you can make leagues where ‘players’ are ranked based on the frequency of their bowel movements.

I have so many questions, I hardly know where to begin. The first, and perhaps the least interesting, is what is the significance of knowing where people poop. If you’re like me, which perhaps you’re not, then the places you go number two are pretty limited. I know several people that have quarantined that activity to their own personal toilet. So their poop map is going to look pretty basic.

Another question is, for what possible reason do you need to have a description option? After my friends begged me to try this app, I decided to start recording some of the basic descriptions. Forgive the nature of these entries, but they help give a good insight into the basic layout of the application.

“Quick pre-breakfast. Nice and quiet. No complaints.”

“Bro, I feel like a rabbit.”

“One word: fiery.”

“Quicky during class.”

These are some of the most basic and least graphic entries the app has to offer. These descriptions provide striking details into the lives of people around me that I never wanted to know. Yet, the description box is a box without laws or boundaries. People are free to type away, with disgusting thoroughness, about their bowel movements.

Another curiosity about this map is the concept of ‘leagues.’ These leagues are started by a user who can share a code with friends. The leagues then track how many times someone has pooped and order them. But is this really a competition?

If someone is pooping six times a day, I would hardly call them a winner. Then certainly, it’s a jarring insight into some of my friends’ lives to learn they only poop once every two weeks.

Listen, poop humor is funny, growing up in the 2000s means that most of us were raised on a healthy amount of bathroom humor. However, there are some things we just don’t need to ever know about each other. 

Pooping is vulnerable and gross. Even though everyone does it and I wish people were more comfortable with it, we’re just not there yet as a society. Yet, the way to overcome this awkwardness is not to use a graphics app to track your poops and compare them to friends. I could have gone my whole life without knowing jalapeno tacos make my friend’s mom go poop four times in two hours, but now I will forever have that knowledge in my head. If you want to download Poop Map, there’s nothing stopping you. Just be warned now, the world has lost a little bit of its majesty now that I’ve downloaded this app. I think part of my soul will forever exist in the murky toilet water of this app, but hey, to each his own.